


Of Tender Years

by zoom



Category: HTTYD, Hijack - Fandom, How to Train Your Dragon - Fandom, RotG, frostcup - Fandom, rise of the guardians
Genre: ...well really pioneer au, Babies, Gen, M/M, colonial!au, if i'm to be honest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-05
Updated: 2013-10-05
Packaged: 2017-12-28 12:19:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,062
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/991932
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zoom/pseuds/zoom
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Baby colonial hijack. 'Nuff said.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Of Tender Years

For every “can’t,” Jackson Overland had a “can too.” His cherry-wood brows were steep as the Devil’s when he winked, and his impish grin was shy of two teeth in the front row.

Jackson was the sort of child who blew spitballs behind church pews and hurled snow at the schoolmaster’s turned back. He was the boy in the disciplinary chair facing the wall, sneaking bold glances away from the little schoolhouse corner to catch his best mate’s rolling eyes.

Only seven years to Jackson’s eight, Henry Haddock wore wry pouts and half-lidded glares with his hand-me-down cuffs. Ugly duckling freckles splashed his cheeks, and dark auburn tresses curled around his ears.

Henry’s breathy voice plucked at irony and wrung it out before witless faces – many a time before Jackson’s fair complexion. But it was Jackson who got the younger boy to show his shy, slightly bucktoothed smile. He would pull him by the hand away from the shackles of schoolbooks and chores with promises of adventure and glory.

One day they might rescue the princess of Avalon from her dragon captor – Henry decided he ought to befriend the beast instead of fight it, and even named him like a puppy. Meantime Jackson complained that _he_ wanted a dragon too, a far greater prize than a measly princess.

Then perhaps they’d navigate the deepest of the ocean’s floor for sunken treasure – Jackson cheated and kept stealing a breath when they were _supposed_ to be underwater, until their aquatic quest devolved into a contest between two glaring, puffy-cheeked little boys to find out who gasped for air first.

Or maybe they’d be kings for a day and turn up their noses to peasants – Henry was _sure_ there could only be a king and a queen, for he’d never heard of _two_ kings reigning over _one_ land. But Jackson reckoned that a king can do whatever he likes, and if hewould rather share a throne with his best pal than some smelly old queen, none could very well stop him, could they?

When first they met in front of the log cabin schoolhouse, Jackson asked after the other boy’s name, but Henry’s only reply was a shrill hiccup. Jackson started a little at the squawkish sound, and Henry clapped his palms over his mouth, shielding all but the mortified green of his round, round eyes. Then the older boy laughed so hard he couldn’t speak, finally sputtering out, “And how – do you do – _Hiccup_?”

Jackson was so pleased with his joke, he never stopped calling the far less amused child “Hiccup.” It took days of relentless teasing before the embarrassed flush left Henry’s ears, and weeks still before Jackson’s infectious glee drew an occasional giggle out of a generally quiet, dry disposition. The older boy loved a challenge, readily taking on the self-appointed mission to coax grins out of his calm, bookish classmate. But his gaming spirit shifted to an honest fondness for the other child’s deadpan humor and simple kindness.

Henry once stooped by the roadside, a little brown squirrel with an unnaturally folded, blood-smattered forepaw in his arms. The biggest bully in their town was almost a teenager, tall and with hair red as his temperament. His shadow loomed over Henry’s bent form, and within a few sharp beats, he’d snatched the wounded animal right out of the child’s hold. Dropping it to the ground with a chortle, the brute hovered his boot heel above the tiny creature’s head, while the little boy shouted and begged him to leave it alone. He even invited the bigger boy to lower a blow on _him_ , just so long as he let the poor animal go.

It was an offer that had always stunned Jackson. He didn’t know anybody else who would forfeit his own wellbeing to the malicious whim of the town bully, and for nothing more than a little broken creature. Their classmates called it absurd, but to the other child’s wide brown eyes, nothing had ever seemed more gallant or true. The boy’s pleas sparked the gall Jackson never before had to run right up to the bully and give him a good hard knuckle to the jaw. His hand stung afterward, and he was chased through half of Burgess for it. But it was more than worth the bright grin Henry gave when next he caught his eye in class, and the gradual inseparability that followed.

One day as their mitted palms patted down the walls of a snow fortress, Jackson told Henry between cloudy huffs of breath, “I want a _real_ fortress. A big castle to keep all the adults out and – and live off of cakes and pies, and never look at a schoolbook again!”

Henry paused his diligent construction work to consider the idea. “You’d get sick,” he predicted bluntly, packing another mound of snow in his brown mittens to layer against their fortress. “And who’s to make your cakes and pies anyway if you won’t let the grown-ups in?”

Ignoring the minor flaws Henry had poked in his plan, Jackson only grinned and stood to stick an armful of fluffy white to the top of their yet meager wall. “And no _girls_ ,” he added, shaping the snowy dollops into the thick barricade. His lips furled with distaste.

In truth, whenever he uttered the word _“girls_ , _”_ he thought of _one_ girl, the older girl with raven hair who chased him around the town streets, pretending she only wanted to see him wiggle his loose tooth. But if he let her dip near his mouth to look, she would dive suddenly and steal a peck from him. Out of all the pranks ever pulled on Jackson in retaliation for his usual mischief, nothing turned him redder or struck him so silent as the wet, clumsy touch of the girl’s mouth to his had.

“And none of the boys neither.” The boy’s unkempt chestnut locks bounced while he shook his head, dismissing the boorish boys in their little quarter of Burgess. “Because no bullies or know-it-alls allowed.”

“But then you’d be alone!” his friend warned with some alarm.

Jackson’s coffee brown eyes reeled dramatically. “Well _you’ll_ be there,” he pointed out.

The other boy stopped, blinking. “Me?” Henry asked, a smile threatening to overtake his gaping lips.

“Aye!” laughed the elder of the two, as though it were the most natural conclusion. He dropped down on his knees to meet his friend’s hopeful gaze head on. “Of course _you_ , Hiccup!”

Henry didn’t have a chance at hiding a big grin now.

There was an anxious knot always tying up the boy’s tummy, twisted by a nasty cousin with big fists, by an ill-tempered father with a big voice, and by an empty chair at the table, where a woman he was afraid of forgetting used to sit. But Jackson knew how to undo the knot with his easy laugh and embracing eyes.

*

Henry was ten when Jackson first left a kiss on his nose.

Jackson, never above stealing another’s tricks, stared seriously at the other boy a couple inches below him, insisting there was something on his nose. Henry rubbed over his round, freckly button-nose, but Jackson only shook his head, leaning closer.

“No, it’s right…” he snatched his opening, pecking the little bulb no deeper than a parent’s kiss goodnight. “There!” cackled the trickster, watching delightedly as his shocked friend stiffened and glanced awkwardly at his feet. Whatever the joke was, Henry failed to grasp the punch line.

It really was meant just to tease, just to trigger the most astonished and bug-eyed expressions. But Jackson grew a little too fond of this particular trick. Too often, the puckish child would sneak quick little kisses over freckly cheeks, _right_ when Henry was in the middle of a sentence, derailing whatever he’d meant to say. But Henry’s complaints never exceeded much more than a pout.

Then for a turnabout, Henry reaped his revenge suddenly after school one day, as he leaned in to his friend to tell a secret. But instead of a whisper in Jackson’s ear, lips brushed briefly against his cheek before Henry retreated in triumph, grinning cheekily at the pink glow growing across a fair face.

It wasn’t so long after Henry started striking back in kind that the two shared a different sort of kiss.

They were crouched behind another snow fortress in the woods. Jackson, not so sure anymore that it was just for a laugh, laid a lingering touch of lips to a warm face. Henry leaned to return the gesture, but somewhere in the journey to his cheek, Jackson turned, and their mouths hovered close.

The boys were old enough to know it was sinful. But they were struck with the same spurt of wayward nerve that drove Jackson to steal biscuits from the top shelf and leave toads in the teacher’s desk, that roped Henry into helping him spread chalk on his cousin’s seat (leaving powdery white on his backside when he stood) and that emboldened him to call the an adult’s answers into question when they didn’t match his own. An overpowering sense of _now_ drowned out the fear of _later_ , and Jackson breached the threshold of air between them.

Their kisses were always light at first, simple puckered meetings in woodsy solitude.

It was the playful secret that twinged at the edge of lips and gleamed in third and fourth glances across the room. It guided Henry’s pencil to sketch dark eyes and hair and a roguish smirk in the place where his notes on _l’impératif_ should have been. It poured a new zeal into Jackson’s everyday clown act, constantly turning his head to be sure a pair of green eyes were watching. It interwove their fingers under tables and hooked their ankles together under benches.

It whittled down their caution until an impatient peck just after class caught the schoolmaster’s notice.

He grabbed them both by the ear and brought the boys back to his desk, staring at them with the gravest of looks upon his wrinkly features. The severity in his voice and eyes alone wobbled the pair’s careless resolve. Invoking the scriptures and recounting the eternal punishment for perversity, their elder sought to instill a deep chill their hearts.

But the hearts of children do not so easily freeze over.

Burgess had no public whipping post, nor gallows to warn the townsfolk where their transgressions led. And though the thought of hellfire alone burns the guilt-ridden soul, threats of damnation have no sway over a carefree spirit. Dangers that could not be seen could not possibly touch them.

As a kindness, the balding schoolmaster kept the matter from their parents – only with the assurance that they would never stray from the straight and narrow again. Their eyes met. They both gave their promises that it would never happen again.

Their fingers were crossed.

That evening, Henry clung to his knees in their little nook of woods. Doubt crept over him with the falling darkness. “We’re not… you don’t think we’re really going to hell, do you?” he finally asked at a near whisper.

Jackson pushed back his unruly bangs from an uneasy brow. Though he was not one unused to strict reprimands, none he’d ever received compared to the utter seriousness in the schoolmaster’s reproach.

A dry little chuckle prefaced Jackson’s reply. “Well… even if we did, at least you’d be in good company.” He flashed his charming grin. All the baby teeth were gone now, and in their place was only the whitest of smiles. Henry’s slight snort pressed the other boy on. “It might not even be that bad. Probably just a lot of talk and only a _little_ fire…”

The other boy smiled back faintly. “I suppose _you_ ought to know.”

“And just _what_ do you mean by that, Hiccup?” Jackson asked playfully.

“Well, I imagine a hellspawn ought to know of his place of origin.”

This instigated an attack that left Henry in a fit of desperate laughter, trying to knock Jackson’s wriggling fingers away from his sensitive sides.

*

Another two years passed of forest-shrouded pecks and too-familiar embraces. Jackson’s mischievous wink alone made lasses giggle and fawn, his boyish prettiness already beginning to harden into a man’s handsome features. Despite his fair standing in class, Henry left school at his father’s urging, and began an apprenticeship with the town smithy.

The separation made days seem dimmer and colder. But when both boys were finally let out for the evening, Jackson escaping a small throng of schoolgirls and Henry throwing aside his leather apron, one boy would spend all the last hours of the day in the forest at the other boy’s side, if not in his arms.

Smithwork strained Henry’s twiggy limbs nearly to the point of snapping. He was so tired by the time he left the smithy, sometimes the moment Henry sat and let his eyes fall closed, the boy’s head would sink against Jackson’s shoulder, and light snores were his only offer of conversation. Whenever the young smith dropped off to sleep, Jackson only pulled him close and blew on his face to provoke slow, sleepy frowns.

With time, the blacksmith’s apprentice learned to amend the instructions of a brawny teacher to better suit his small frame, using smaller tools and heaving with all his weight, not just his arms. When he did, the work became almost play. He was surrounded with metal and wooden canvases, and once his primary chores were done, he was allowed to hew out whatever imagery he liked.

Late that year, Jackson’s mother became round with the weight of another child. The little girl she bore shared her brother’s eyes, and the moment she was born the boy had to run to every house on his street, and tell every neighbor in a breathless ramble all about his new sister.

“She’s balder than the preacher!” he explained to Henry from atop a tree bough. “And her head’s not even so big as my hand!”

While Henry doodled in his old notebook, the newly made brother leaned back on his branch and hung upside down from it. Brushing aside crumbles of lead laid out on his page, the younger boy didn’t even glance up when he spoke.

“You go on as though you’ve never seen a baby in all your life,” he commented with a little exasperated smile. All afternoon, Jackson could talk of nothing else. “They do tend to be hairless. And quite tiny. Makes the, um, _process_ simpler, I believe…”

“Aye but Hiccup,” The boy jumped down clumsily. “She’s my _sister_.” He spoke the word as though it were holy. “It’s – I mean it’s like a new pet!”

Henry’s green eyes rose. “Are you comparing your sister to a _pet_?”

“Well she has to be walked, and fed, and she can’t talk yet—”

“Well I can only hope you don’t plan on taking her out on a _leash_ ,” Henry retorted with a roll of his eyes.

“No, I just…” For the first time that day, the boy bit his lip and didn’t speak. How to make his friend understand this incredible new feeling the little child brought him…

“I have to look out for her, you know? She’s so little and, it’s… she _needs_ me.”

The moment the words were out, the town prankster cringed and tried to take back the utterly _girlish_ admission. But Henry, the boy who’d rescued rodents from the roadside and nursed furry limbs to health, just smiled, and turned back to his drawing.

*

It was another golden year or so before it happened.

Jackson’s father began to cough and wheeze, and seldom left his bed. He only stopped hacking and gasping when he stopped breathing.

Henry was nearly fourteen, still a scrawny boy with all his childish freckles and clothes that never quite fit. But his arms around Jackson held firm.

Only when Jackson told him what he meant to do, Henry didn’t feel half so strong as his grip around his closest friend.

The older boy’s mother and sister needed to eat, as did he, and there was a cousin on a ranch not far from Burgess. The ranch was in need of shepherds to lead its flock across New England pastures. The pay was enough to get Jackson’s family by.

So Jackson gave a kiss to his loves, upon his mother’s brow, his sister’s cheek, and long upon Henry’s lips and jaw and knuckles. Then he was gone all the warm months of that year.

There were letters, promises and news and meandering nonsense. They didn’t compare to touch or sight, but a word from a loved one means more than a touch or smile from any other.

At the dawn of winter, Jackson returned as always with a little bag of belongings, a crook over his shoulder, and a wide grin over an ever more beautiful face.

He was tall as his father had been by sixteen, full-shouldered and thick-necked. And nothing, nothing could be more entrancing to Henry than the sight of him on his doorstep.

Though Jackson’s visits only lasted as long as it was cold, while the sheep were kept indoors, no heart is warmer than when its dear friend is near.

Henry’s thick locks between Jackson’s long fingers were growing shaggy. It was still a few inches dip to reach his lips, and his hand-me-downs were still loose under Jackson’s embrace.

Once simple touches and pecks turned feverish between the older, too long separated boys. Once easy friendship and caring turned passionate and demanded words – exactly three.

Each goodbye seemed harder than the last. But each had his work and his family to think of, so away Jackson went, while Henry lingered behind.

*

The second winter was all the haggard cries of young lovemaking. The third was the shouts and shoves over a blue-eyed kiss stolen in the summer. The fourth was the slide of a forgiven and forgotten embrace.

The fifth was a cabin just outside a town close to the sheep pastures, where a young blacksmith opened his own shop, and a handsome shepherd guarded his flock.

It wasn’t a castle, but in one another they still saw a king, just the same as when Henry was seven and Jackson was eight, playing in their fortress made of snow.


End file.
